PREFATORY NOTE

[By Arthur Livingston]

No apology is necessary for offering to
American readers a play which critics, with
singular unanimity, have called one of the most
original productions seen on the modern stage. In
less than a year's time, "Six Characters in
Search of an Author" has won a distinguished
place in the dramatic literature of the Western
world, attracting audiences and engaging
intellects far removed from the particular
influences which made of it a season's sensation
in Italy.

Yet the word "original" is not
enough, unless we embrace under that
characterization qualities far richer than those
normally credited to the "trick" play.
The "Six Characters" is something more
than an unusually ingenious variation of the
"play within a play." It is something
more than a new twist given to the "dream
character" made familiar by the contemporary
Italian grotesques. It is a dramatization of the
artistic process itself, in relation to the
problem of reality and unreality which has engaged
Pirandello in one way or another for more than
twenty years.

I venture to insist upon this point as against
those observers who have tried to see in the
"Six Characters" an ironical satire of
the commercial drama, as we know it today, mixed,
more or less artificially, with a rather obvious
philosophy of neo-idealism. No such mixture
exists. The blend is organic. The object of
Pirandello's hitter irony is not the
stage-manager, nor the theatrical producer, nor
even the dramatic critic: it is the dramatist; it
is the artist; it is, in the end, life itself. I
suppose the human soul presents no mysteries to
those who have been thoroughly grounded in the
science of Freud. But in spite of psycho-analysis
a few Hamlets still survive. Pirandello is one of
them.

What are people really like? In the business
of everyday life, nothing is commoner than the
categorical judgment sweeping and assured in its
affirmatives. But as we cut a little deeply into
the living matter of the spirit, the problem
becomes more complicated. Do we ever understand
the whole motivation of an action -- not in others
only but even in ourselves?

Oh, yes, there are people who know. .
. . The State knows, with its laws and its
procedures. And society knows, with its
conventions. And individuals know, with their
formulas for conduct often cannily applied with
reference to interest. -- The ironical element,
as everyone has noted, is fundamental in
Pirandello!

Apart from works in his earlier manner
(realistic pictures from Southern Italian life,
including such gems as
"Sicilian
Limes"), Pirandello's most distinctive
productions have dealt with this general theme.
No one of them, indeed, exhausts it. And how
could this be otherwise? Pirandello, approaching
the sixties, to be sure, is nevertheless in spirit
a man of the younger Italian generation, which,
trained by Croce and Gentile, has "learned
how to think." But however great his delight
in playing with "actual idealism," he
knows the difference between a drama and a
philosophical dissertation. His plays are
situations embodying conclusions, simple, or
indeed "obvious" in their
convincingness. They must he taken as a whole --
if one would look for a full statement of
Pirandello's "thought."

A "thought," moreover, which may or
may not invite us to profound reflection. Enough
for the lover of the theatre is the fact that
Pirandello derives the most interesting dramatic
possibilities from it. Sometimes it is the
"reality" which society sees brought
into contrast with the reality which action proves
(Il piacere dell'onestà) . Again, it is
the "reality" which a man sees in
himself thwarted by the reality which actually
controls ("Ma non è una cosa seria"). In
"Right You Are" (Così è,
se vi pare) we have a general satire of the
"cocksure," who, placed in the presence
of reality and unreality, are unable to
distinguish one from the other.

In the "Six Characters" it is the
turn of the artist. Can art -- creative art,
where the spirit would seem most autonomous --
itself determine reality? No, because once
"a character is born, he acquires such an
independence, even of his own author, that he can
be imagined by everybody in situations where the
author never dreamed of placing him, and so
acquires a meaning which the author never thought
of giving him." In this lies the great
originality of this very original play -- the
discovery (so Italian, when one thinks of it, and
so novel, as one compares it with the traditional
rôle of the "artist" in the
European play) that the laborious effort of
artistic creation is itself a dramatic theme -- so
unruly, so assertive, is this thing called
"life" ever rising to harass and defeat
anyone who would interpret, crystallize,
devitalize it.

And beyond the drama lies the poetry, a poetry
of mysterious symbolism made up of terror, and
rebellion, and pity, and human kindliness. Let us
not miss the latter, especially, in the complex
mood of all Pirandello's theatre.

* * *

The three plays of Pirandello, here offered in
translations that do not hope to be adequate, are
famous specimens of the theatre in Italy.
The term "new" is
much contested, not only in Italy but abroad. In
using the word here it is not necessary to claim
that this young, impulsive, fascinatingly
boisterous after-the-war Italy is doing things
that no one else ever thought of doing. We remain
on safe ground if we assert that Pirandello and
his associates have broken the bounds set to the
old fashioned "sentimental" Latin play.

The motivations of the "old" theatre
were largely ethical in character, developing
spiritual crises from the conflict of impulses
with a rigid framework of law and convention.
Dramatic art was, so to speak, a department of
geometry, dealing with this or that projection or
modification of the triangle. Husbands tearing
their hair as wives proved unfaithful;
disappointed lovers pining in eternal fidelity to
mates beyond their social sphere; cuckolds
heroically sheathing the stiletto in deference to
a higher law of respectability; widows sending
second-hand aspirants to suicide that the
sacrament of marriage might remain inviolate: --
such were the themes.

And there is no doubt, besides, that this
"old" theatre produced works of great
beauty and intenseness; since the will in conflict
with impulse and triumphing over impulse always
presents a subject entrancing in human interest
and noble in moral implications.

But the potentialities of drama are more
numerous than the permutations of three. The
"new" theatre in Italy is
"new" in this discovery at least.

* * *

"Henry IV.," an equally strong and
original variation of the insanity motive, is the
first of two plays by Pirandello dealing with a
special aspect of the problem of reality and
unreality. The second, not yet given to the
public, is Vestire gli ingnudi (", . . And
ye clothed me!"). In the former Pirandello
studies a situation where an individual finds a
world of unreality thrust upon him, voluntarily
reassuming it later on, when tragedy springs from
the deeper reality. In "And ye clothed
me!" we have a girl who, to fill an empty
life of no importance, creates a fiction for
herself, only to find it torn violently from her
and to be left in a naked reality that is, after
all, so unreal.

These two plays indicate the present tendency
of Pirandello's rapid production -- a tendency
that promises even richer results as this
interesting author delves more extensively into the
mysteries of individual psychology.

"Henry IV.," meanwhile, is before us.
It can speak for itself.

* * *

All of Pirandello's plays are built for acting,
and only incidentally for reading. We
make this observation with
"Right You Are" especially in mind, since
that play, above all, is a test for the actor. It
is typical of Pirandello for its rapidity, its
harshness and its violence -- the skill with which
the tense tableau is drawn out of pure dialectic,
pure "conversation." Moreover, it states
a fundamental preoccupation of Pirandello in
peculiarly lucid and striking fashion. Perhaps a
better rendering of the title Così è (se vi
pare) will occur to many. Ludwig Lewisohn
(happily, I thought) suggested "As You Like
It," no less. A possibility, quite in the
spirit of Pirandello's title in general, would
have been another Shakespearean reminiscence: ". .
. and Thinking Makes It So." We have kept
something approximating the literal, which would
be: "So it is (if you think so)."

The text of the "Six Characters" is
that of the translation designated by the author
and which was used in the sensational productions
of the play given in London and New York.

A.L.

[Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) received
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.
Arthur Livingston (1883-1944)
was professor of Italian at Columbia University]